"Think that did anything?" X asked as he bent down and picked up a discarded copper pipe from the street. He turned it in his hands, checked the hollow interior, then began packing something into one end with quick, efficient movements.
"I doubt it," Sarandel replied, lowering her bow but keeping her gaze fixed on the collapsed building.
The rubble shifted. Stone slid off in sheets, dust spilling downward as something rose from within. King Domine stepped out from the wreckage, brushing debris from his shoulders. There wasn't a mark on him.
"You had to have known that wouldn't do anything to me," he said, giving himself a small shake to dislodge the last fragments of stone.
Sarandel didn't answer. She made a subtle motion with her hand toward X.
He nodded once and stepped forward—then vanished, reappearing directly behind Domine. "Let's get this started," X said as he swung the copper pipe toward the Demon King's back.
The moment the pipe neared Domine's body, his back split open at the point of impact. The pipe plunged inside and a good portion of X's forearms followed with it, swallowed up to mid-length. Jagged teeth erupted inward from the edges of the opening, snapping toward his arms.
X reacted instantly. He tore himself backward with both speed and force, boots scraping across stone as he ripped his arms free just before the teeth could close. He hopped several feet away, resetting his stance as Domine's body sealed seamlessly, leaving no trace of the rift.
"Was that it?" King Domine asked, turning to face him. "You swung… a pipe at me?"
"I did a little more than that," X replied.
Domine's eyes narrowed. His jaw shifted as he began to expel what he had consumed. His mouth opened and the copper pipe started to emerge between his teeth.
BOOM.
A compact explosion detonated inside his mouth, smoke bursting outward and briefly swallowing his head.
*Will that do something?* X wondered—
—and then King Domine's tail shot forward and pierced straight through his heart...
---
X turned just as the tail thrust toward him again. The barbed tip slicing through empty air where his chest had been. Then he ducked under it before it could slash his throat and hopped even further backwards.
"So that didn't work, huh?" he remarked as Domine once again stood completely fine.
"You…" Domine said slowly, pointing at him. "You're rewinding time after dying, aren't you? That's why you dodge like you already know what's coming."
A distorted chuckle escaped behind X's skull mask. "You're smarter than your Demon Lord. That guy couldn't figure it out at all, just raged. So good on you for that."
He glanced toward Sarandel, the shift in posture making it obvious he needed support.
Domine followed the look and turned toward her. "What is your plan? You can't kill me. Why waste your breath?" he asked before dashing toward her, claws reared back, deciding fighting X directly would accomplish nothing.
Sarandel clicked her tongue and tapped her foot against the ground. The street ruptured as two massive stone golems burst upward from beneath it. The first immediately brought both fists down in a crushing blow aimed at Domine. He raised his arms to block, and the impact exploded the ground beneath them, stone blasting outward and forming a fresh crater.
From within the settling dust, Domine let out a dark chuckle. "It's nice to see sisters get along so well," he said.
The second golem stepped in and smashed its left fist into his side, sending him sliding across the broken street. He dug his claws into the ground to halt himself, carving trenches behind him, then ripped a twenty-foot slab of earth free and hurled it toward the constructs.
One of the golems smashed straight through the airborne mass, but Domine was already past it. He closed the distance and drove his fist forward, the punch pulverizing the first golem entirely into a cloud of shattered stone.
The remaining golem swung again. Domine ducked under the descending arm and drove his tail through what would have been its knee, hooking it and yanking forward. The construct's balance broke. He seized it, pivoted, and hurled the massive body upward into the sky.
"Was that all?" he asked, turning his head slightly toward Sarandel as the golem crashed down behind him.
Sarandel lifted her hand and pointed upward.
The sphere blazing above the city reacted.
Its surface tightened, the radiance concentrating inward for the briefest instant, brightness sharpening rather than expanding. The light stopped spilling outward and instead compressed toward a single focal point directly beneath it.
Then she brought her finger down.
A line of white carved through the air.
It wasn't a gradual descent. It was instantaneous alignment — a vertical axis drawn from the burning sphere to the ground below. The beam struck King Domine with such force that the impact flattened the space around him for a split second before everything detonated outward.
Stone didn't just shatter — it vaporized at the center. The street cratered violently, the shockwave blasting debris in a perfect expanding ring. Windows imploded across distant buildings. Rooftops tore free. The sound followed half a breath later, a concussive roar that drowned out everything else and shook the ruins to their foundations.
At the point of contact, the light intensified to a density that erased detail entirely. Domine's outline appeared in stark black for a single frozen instant — a figure suspended inside a pillar of pure radiance — before the column drove harder, deeper, as if trying to force him beneath the earth itself.
The beam held.
Then slowly, deliberately, it thinned and retracted skyward.
X let out a low whistle as dust and incandescent vapor rolled outward from the blast zone. "That was a lot," he said, peering through the settling haze. "Let's see if it did anything to confirm our theory."
The light vanished completely.
A silhouette stood at the center of the devastation.
As the smoke peeled away, King Domine came into view, upright within a far deeper crater than before. The ground around him had been erased down to raw stone.
He looked untouched.
"Then this confirms it," Sarandel said, lowering her hand and crossing her arms.
"That guy…" X muttered.
"He's immune to magic."